The magenta and yellow foliage of the pine trees in Fiona Lowry’s lost to nothing reads like the negative of a colour photograph, a reversed image that deranges the visible world by making light and colour the opposite of itself. Lowry further complicates visual perception in this image through her signature airbrushing technique, which creates an optical plane that shifts between clarity and blurriness, so that the image as a whole never quite comes into focus. The visual experience she creates in lost to nothing is a kind of psychedelia, a sensory subversion that places the world at a remove and unhinges normal optical perception. Its strange and alienated treescape of livid leaves and shimmering trunks belongs to the pyschological space of dreams, of memory or trauma; a repository of lived experience distorted and altered by emotion and imagination.

Lowry’s paintings depict Australian landscapes as places animated by hidden energies and inhabited by the sinister threat of violence. Many of her works feature figures in remote bush locations, where a sense of moral and physical danger pervades the beauty of the landscape. The coupling of beauty and terror in the ‘wide brown land’ has been a favoured theme of Australian cinema, and Lowry brings it to bear on the more benign traditions of Australian landscape painting by siting her works in places like the Belanglo State Forest, where the remains of seven murdered backpackers were discovered in 1993. Lowry’s image of the radiata pines that grow in the Belanglo Forest suggests that in the Australian imagination this place is associated with mind-altering terror and horror. As the killing ground of one of Australia’s worst serial murderers this innocent pine plantation has become a blurred psychological space of fear, empathic imagination and fascination. Lowry’s hallucinatory treatment of the trees that grow there expresses a landscape that is a product of what we know, imagine and feel, as well as what we see – a place irrevocably coloured by our knowledge of the terrible events that took place there